Gaslight Version 2 is fully compatible with iTunes 11 – apologies it’s taken so long to come out. Since GasLight was first released, Apple have deprecated and/or removed half a dozen frameworks that it used to rely on, so it’s taken a while to rewrite it all. Some of my 9 year old code is pretty hideous, too

Wow. Assuming my website archives are accurate, it’s been close to 2 years since the last GasLight update. For those unfamiliar with it, GasLight is an iTunes visualizer for displaying purty graphics.

The chief difference is that it now works on intel machines. Also, due to a bug introduced in iTunes 7, I’ve had to remove the config window shortcut (‘c’), since there was a risk of getting GasLight stuck in fullscreen otherwise.

I got a 4GB nano recently – nice, but my 18GB of music doesn’t fit no matter how hard you squeeze.
Sure, iTunes can generate a nano-sized playlist for you, but if you happen to want to listen to full albums then you’re stuck with manually populating the list. This utterly sucks, and is completely counter to the way the iPod should work.

So, I ended up creating a little app that can generate random album-based playlists. You can specify how big a playlist you want, and optionally install a launch agent daemon that will regenerate a playlist for you every night.

It’s very much a needs-based app at the moment – eg I don’t need an uninstaller for the launch agent, so there isn’t one. I don’t need to be able to specify a set of songs that must be included, so you can’t. I don’t need it to display ripples/smoke/gravity waves around the window while it generates a playlist, so…umm…it doesn’t.

I’m including the source with this app in the hope that anyone who does have an uncatered-for need might fix it themselves and send me the changes.

Download it, and let me know how it goes.

Update : Ooops. I uploaded a broken version that effectively just created a random playlist for you, without bothering to make albums out of them. Not so useful…

We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes. Please visit www.apple.com/itunes